Here's the thing with Lauren Jackson: Behind those sparkling blue eyes and radiant smile is a complicated woman.

You can't pigeonhole her because Jackson, the Australian center who makes her third WNBA All-Star Game appearance Saturday in New York, is a 77-inch tower of contradictions.

Jackson, 22, has become one of the league's most-feared inside players. She swaps elbows, blocks shots and powers into the lane, averaging a league-high 19.7 points per game.

She can also shift into a graceful gear, sliding to the top of the key to stroke a 3-pointer.

Jackson plays like a veteran with an enviable focus. Yet when the Storm routed San Antonio by 40 points on June 22, she looked like a kid on the bench, playfully shoving a dancing teammate Sue Bird in the direction of kneeling coach Anne Donovan. Bird nearly fell into Donovan, whose back was to her players.

The dichotomy doesn't stop with her game, but manifests into Jackson's being.

"You can have a cup of coffee with her and she's like she's 35 years old. Other times she's dancing around being 22," said Carrie Graf, a former Storm assistant and coach of Jackson's pro team in Australia, the Canberra Capitals.

"That's just who she is. She is one of a kind."

Great beginnings

Jackson emerges from the locker room after a recent practice, her bleached blond hair still wet, her baby blue tank top short enough to reveal the tips of tattoos at her waist.

Her arms are filled with the contents of a care package from Australia, jars of Vegemite and Violet Crumble candy bars with bright purple wrappers, insisting, "It's the way it shatters that matters."

Jackson offers Donovan a container of Vegemite.

The coach turns up her nose. "I've tried it -- no thanks," she says. What Donovan does want is Jackson's potential, spilled out in a steady stream for years. Jackson is familiar with the mantra, having spent the majority of her life living up to expectations.

Born to Australian basketball-star parents, Jackson started playing the game when she was 5. She left her parents' home in Albury when she was 15, already a household name.

"Everyone had heard about her," said Sandy Brondello, a teammate on the Australian national team and the Storm. "She was coming in as just a young kid. She might have come off as arrogant, but she was still a kid."

At 16, Jackson became the youngest woman named to the Australian national team.

"We're at the World Championships and she's got her arms around her mom's neck," Brondello said. "She's playing in the World Championships, and that. It was cute."

It made for a unique adolescence.

"I was 16 and everyone was 10 years older. I was a baby! I didn't talk, didn't say anything, kept to myself," Jackson said. "But I played with everything I had. It was the only thing I could do."

In 2000, Jackson captured a silver medal with the Australian team at the Sydney Olympics. A few months later, then-Storm coach and general manager Lin Dunn made her the No. 1 overall pick in the 2001 WNBA draft.

Jackson averaged 15.2 points and 6.7 rebounds and finished second to Jackie Stiles in Rookie of the Year voting that summer.

But pangs of homesickness shook her during her first season. Veteran WNBA players got under her skin with trash talk and the most physical play she had experienced.

"Teams went out to try to get in her head, and the first couple seasons, that worked," Graf, now an assistant with the Phoenix Mercury, said.

Jackson missed two games because of a shoulder injury, and the Storm finished 10-22.

"She had so many challenges, leaving family and friends, so many high expectations. She still hadn't developed her body," Dunn said. "Her overall development -- mentally, physically, emotionally -- she was still young. But everyone knew all along that it was just a matter of time. When it came together, wow, watch out."

Fun and games

Jackson had another strong season in 2002, averaging 17.2 points and helping the Storm make the playoffs for the first time. But after scoring 19 points in a Game 1 loss to the Los Angeles Sparks, she scored only four points in Game 2 as the Storm was eliminated.

This spring, Jackson spent a few weeks in Bawley Point, a serene beach on the south coast of Australia, resting before she headed to Seattle for training camp. She surfed, sun-bathed and recovered her "soul," she said.

"I turn into a hippie. I stay in my Caravan and relax. I have to," she said. "For my soul, I have to."

But questions swirled around Jackson's arrival this off-season. Would she be tough enough to anchor the Storm's inside game in the rough-and-tumble Western Conference? Would she be soft and injury-prone? Would she be spent after a six-month season in Australia?

She scored 15 points in each of the Storm's first three games, all losses. The questions became bold-faced. But Jackson answered, averaging 22 points over the next five games. The Storm enters the All-Star break in third place at 9-7, largely because of Jackson's talent and toughness.

"She's such a passionate person. She'll stand up for what she believes and never back down," Brondello said. "A few years ago, she might have. But this past year, she's grown the most. She has shown a lot of mental toughness and really built up her body."

But toughness and strength are only half the equation. Jackson is happier than she was as a rookie.

"I'm so thankful for basketball. If I didn't play, I'd be pretty unhappy, still living where I grew up, getting teased for being this tall, crazy, geeky child -- which I was ... but, ha-ha," she says with a look-at-me-now grin.

She laments that she can't go dancing at clubs -- "People know me. I stick out," she says -- so she recalls her wildest moment, her 21st birthday party at a café in Canberra last spring, a "Rocky Horror Picture Show"-themed bash to which she arrived dressed as the transvestite Frank N. Furter, Tim Curry's character in the cult-movie classic.

"I looked exactly like him. It took me three months to recover," she says.

"She's very down to earth. She lives a simple, quiet life," said Dunn, who visited Jackson in Australia last year. "She is a hometown hero and handles that well.

"She enjoys the outdoors -- she even had me out trying to surf. I thought I was going to drown! But it was fun, and that's one of the things about Lauren -- she likes to have fun."

In Seattle, Jackson relaxes with teammates at their team-provided apartments in Belltown.

"On the court, she is a star and many things are expected of her," Graf said. "But she can blow off steam and remain young and do things that normal 22-year-olds do."

Jackson enjoys her teammates, her burgeoning profile in Seattle and the game that has nurtured her.

"I couldn't be anywhere else. I love Seattle, and the people and," she throws up her arms and smiles, "all of this."